Currently, five Mexican microrobots are heading towards the Moon. They are aboard the Peregrino 1 spacecraft, which took off early Monday morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida (United States), and should reach the satellite in about six weeks. Although the takeoff was a success, the module has a fuel leak that puts the mission, which is the first private initiative to the Moon, at serious risk. It is also the first time that Mexico participates in an expedition to this star. In charge are the UNAM and the Mexican Space Agency, which have named the project Colmena, in honor of these small robots prepared to work as a team, like a swarm. Between the five of them they do not exceed 300 grams. Now, the Mexican space dream travels wrapped in a package of cookies.
The next space race has already begun. Countries no longer just want to set foot on the Moon, but rather lay the foundations to take advantage of its materials and settle the first colonies. And from there prepare the jump to Mars in about 20 years. The plan is gigantic. Decades ago, governments such as the United States and Russia bet on the universe, followed by China—which has already landed on the moon three times in the last 10 years—and India. In an extremely competitive industry, in which the European and Japanese Space Agency also play, Mexico is trying to find its place. It's not easy with so many years of disadvantage. Trying to open a gap, the Colmena project was born.
Researcher Gustavo Medina, head of the Space Instrumentation Laboratory, UNAM Institute of Nuclear Sciences, and head of the mission, believes he has found the niche in small things. There are already others building large robots, large vehicles, but Mexico is specializing in nanotechnology that allows the creation of many robots: tiny but efficient. While others focus on lions or elephants, Mexico is betting on bees. “Simple beings that together manage to do great things, because there are many of them and they know how to cooperate,” explains Medina, “instead of sending a large machine to extract a mineral, which costs a lot and if it breaks everything is lost, I can send 100,000 tiny robots. , that if one dies nothing happens. The project can resist. That's the philosophy.”
This is how the Colmena mission began to be considered in 2015, when Mexico presented its project to the company Astrobotic, which is the creator of Peregrino 1 and which, sponsored by NASA, is in charge of the trip. The company selected UNAM's idea for the first commercial mission to the Moon in history, along with 19 others that come from NASA, Germany, Japan or the United Kingdom. “We are twinning with the big countries,” said the director of the Mexican Space Agency, Salvador Landeros, who considers the project “something historic.” Also on board the ship is a time capsule with messages from 80,000 children from around the world and the ashes of the creator of Star TrekGene Roddenberry, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and three United States presidents: George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
With sensors and fins: designed to survive
The Mexican project has had a budget of 13 million pesos (about 770,000 dollars), coming equally from the Mexican Space Agency and the National Council of Science and Technology. Six million have been dedicated to the creation of the robots, in which 250 UNAM students have participated, in engineering, but also in mathematics, physics or chemistry, art and law; The other seven million have been for the launch with Peregrino.
Colmena is made up of five robots measuring 12 centimeters in diameter and weighing 56 grams each. They have wheels and some kind of fins. They live off the energy they get from their solar panels, which are flexible to withstand the vibration that comes with being launched in a special rocket. They also have sensors, microprocessors, intelligence to navigate autonomously and radars to move and communicate with other robots. Devices so small have never operated in space, Medina says proudly. “They are designed to learn what the challenges are of making such a tiny and sophisticated thing and for it to travel through space and survive, reach the Moon and survive.”
The Moon is a very aggressive environment, with drastic changes in temperature, radiation, lunar dust, impacts of interplanetary material. So, the first objective of the robots is to review what design strategies do serve to survive and identify problems that their creators have not yet imagined, “but that certainly exist,” says the head of Colmena. Its second goal is scientific: to understand how the regolith behaves, its characteristics, also to try to learn about that layer of smaller grains, which float about 20 or 30 centimeters from the surface of the Moon, to observe how telecommunications work there or “properties that have never been measured.”
A space catapult
Its small size also opens up many questions. “It is not the same whether a human or an animal steps on the surface of the Moon. rover, when the dust is compacted, that if you are so light, when the dust behaves differently, like a kind of fluid,” says Medina, who explains that for this reason the robots have paddles to “navigate”, in addition to some four centimeter wheels. The movement on the satellite was the last phase of the mission. Previously, robots had to survive the launch and also the moon landing. For that, they traveled wrapped, actually, in a kind of cookie package, Medina explains, along with a deployment and telecommunications module—called TTDM—which has several functions. It serves to receive the information that the robots collect on the Moon, while it remains on the ship, make the connection and be able to transfer the swarm data to Earth; and also serves as a catapult.
Medina says it and laughs: “If it worked for the Romans, why not for us?” When the ship reaches the Moon there is nothing to lower the robots, so the module becomes the first space catapult and throws them about 10 or 15 meters away. It is important that they go far because they work with solar energy and being in the shadow of the device is the same as a death sentence. “They can fall belly up or belly down, that's why they have solar panels on both sides,” explains the researcher. Then they have to “form a coordinate system so that they know where their companions are: they have to do that autonomously, because we don't know where they are going to fall.”
That would have been the plan. However, an incident during the ship's propulsion caused a critical loss of fuel, making it very difficult for Peregrine to reach the Moon. In his last statement, the Astrobotic company identifies a leak that will cause the module to run out of power within 40 hours. Peregrine is solar-powered, but requires fuel to keep the craft in a stable direction pointing toward the sun. “Right now, the goal is to get Peregrino as close to lunar distance as possible before it loses the ability to maintain its position,” the company said.
Medina, in his conversation with EL PAÍS, is already considering the option of his five robots not landing on the Moon. “If they don't arrive, the mission was already a success, from the moment it was able to get on top of the rocket,” he says. “It is a bit u
nrealistic to talk about failures when you are doing something so innovative and so far-reaching, what you have are failures and the important thing is not to fall, it is to get up. We are already building the second mission.”
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